Racialisation and Exclusion In the City

Previous research has shown how politics are inscribed in cities and how spatial arrangements produce symbolic boundaries that shape people’s sense of belonging and social interactions. Politics and ideologies materialise in human geographies (Soja, 1989). Historically, cities have been open to international (and internal) migration, spaces where “newness comes into the world” (Keith, 2005:255; Massey, 2000). They juxtapose multiple histories and differences within shared geographical contexts (Massey, 2000). Thus, the multiculturalism of twenty-first-century cities is both demographically inevitable and politically disruptive. In this context, processes of racialisation and othering are materially and symbolically produced in public spaces. Urban spaces not only stage but also materialise racialised performances in everyday life (Keith, 2005), making the city a key site for understanding the tensions between multiculturalism, race and ethnicity, and their evolving dynamics. Racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and ethnic cleansing continue to haunt cities as urban nightmares, providing historical and spatial residues of colonialism and empire. This makes it necessary to approach the city as providing a critical lens to examine localised understandings to grasp how racialisation processes are materialised in urban spaces in specific national and transnational contexts. We invite papers that explore the diverse global processes through which forms of exclusion, segregation, and ghettiosation emerge as spaces and places are racialised. We would like papers that highlight how racial meanings are locally produced yet globally entangled, and how urban space becomes both the stage and the material substance of racialisation.